My friendship with Luigi goes back to the early 1990s and, as he himself once wrote when presenting an exhibition of mine, it began playing football on the small pitches on the outskirts of Perugia. Luigi was a defender who was hard to get past, elegant in his movements and with an excellent long ball. From those bare-earth pitches, whose dim lighting, battered surface and epic matches on freezing evenings, in winters the like of which we no longer have, I recall with nostalgia, was born what I consider my last “youthful” friendship: not in the matter of age (we had both comfortably passed thirty), but for the carefree spirit of challenge and play in which we met.

It did not take us long, as we spent time together, to discover a shared interest in authors such as Zweig, Schnitzler, Buzzati, Lernet-Holenia, Bontempelli… and then the same passion for the painting of the Italian Novecento, Sironi, Magic Realism and Donghi, Metaphysical painting… During our long walks in the town centre, our afternoon aperitifs and the many evenings spent together, memories of our Roman years surfaced, helping to define that common background which is the foundation of every relationship. Over the years I came to appreciate the irony and, at the same time, the never merely formal depth of his observations, and I shared a certain disenchantment of his with the political affairs of our day, his non-aligned view of “official” culture, whose ever more frequent hollowness we both perceived.

Nor can I fail to recall, in these brief notes, Luigi’s generosity in allowing me to publish, first in “Diomede” and later in “Studi Umbri”, reflections and reviews on artistic subjects.

Decades have passed since those football games, and they now seem to belong to another age, yet my friendship with Luigi has come through all this time intact, as fresh as the wind that swept across those pitches when, in the evenings, we chased after a ball.

Paolo Bellegrandi